Friday, March 05, 2004

Styrofoam recycling

Disposing of large amounts of styrofoam is a real pain. While there's some packaging stores that will take clean styrofoam peanuts, it's a challenge to dispose of large styrofoam blocks.

Most attempts to recycle styrofoam don't work very well. Styrofoam is cheap to produce. The standard method of recycling -- grinding up the styrofoam, heating it, and reforming it into blocks -- makes low quality styrofoam. But I was impressed when I came across this paper (pdf) from Sony. It's a clever method of melting the styrofoam, storing it efficiently, then extracting the raw material. All with non-toxic solvents. Sounds like a great solution.

Blue Earth Solutions recycles large amounts of Styrofoam. They have a patented solution that breaks it down to its original form to produce Polystyrene pellets. The Pellets are then resold to Plastics manufactures.